Struggling to explain something to your toddler could help them learn

Parents should not worry if they stumble over words and litter their sentences
with "ums" and "ahs" when they try to explain something
to their children – it will actually help them to learn, claims research.

The researchers, at the University of Rochester in New York, found the youngsters react to their parents' stumbles and hesitations, recognising they are about to be taught something.

It turns out that as you are fumbling for the correct word, you are also sending your child a signal that you are about to teach him something new, so he should pay attention, according to the researchers.

Dr Richard Aslin, one of the study's authors, said toddlers have a lot of information to process while they listen to an adult speak, including many words that they have never heard before.

He said if a child's brain waits until a new word is spoken and then tries to figure out what it means after the fact, it becomes a much more difficult task and the child is apt to miss what comes next.

Dr Aslin said: "The more predictions a listener can make about what is being communicated, the more efficiently the listener can understand it."

The researchers studied three groups of children between the ages of 18 and 30 months.

Each child sat on his or her parent's lap in front of a monitor with an eye-tracking device.

Two images appeared on the screen: one image of a familiar item (like a ball or a book) and one made-up image with a made-up name (like a "dax" or a "gorp").

A recorded voice talked about the objects with simple sentences.

When the voice stumbled and said "Look at the, uh …" the child instinctively looked at the made-up image much more often than the familiar image (almost 70 per cent of the time).

Celeste Kidd, a graduate student and lead author, said: "We're not advocating that parents add disfluencies to their speech, but I think it's nice for them to know that using these verbal pauses is okay – the "uhs" and "um's" are informative."

In the study, the effect was only significant in children older than two years.

The younger children, the researchers reasoned, had not yet learned the fact that disfluencies tend to precede novel or unknown words.

When children are between the ages of two and three, they usually are at a developmental stage where they can construct rudimentary sentences of about two to four words in length. And they typically have a vocabulary of a few hundred words.

The study builds on earlier research by Jennifer Arnold, a scientist at the University of North Carolina and a former postdoctoral fellow at Rochester, which found that adults also can use "um's" and "uhs" to their advantage in understanding language.

Additionally, work by Anne Fernald at Stanford University has shown that it's not the quality but the quantity of speech that a child is exposed to that is most important for learning.